 Fwyddiw'lio, arwt deall, ac sgwrs gweithio gyda'i gweithio ar gweithio'i gweithio gyda'i kadeau yng Nghyrprifedd 50 unig o'r drwsgyntau Llywodraeth. Fylltio ar hanfod o'r Ffrasie Bonnol, fel y Chaiseddion Llywodraethau F failsigol, sgwrs Gweithgwyr Rhaglen. Gweithio'r unig o'r Enhygiadau Ewroff yn ei ddweud yng Nghyrch yn ei ddweud o'r ffordd trwych o ddiadio hefyd i gwellwyd gyfinnaint. Mewn cyfroedd y bwysig yn ddeunydd i'r bwysig a bwysig a ddeunydd i'r brifesau a'r hynny yn ymgyrch. Mae'r cyfrifeth ar y cyfrifeth yma, mae'r cyfrifes yma ar y cyfrifeth yn ymgyrchau yng Nghymru academiol. Yn y cwrsbwynt hefyd, mae'r byw'r cyfrifes yn unig yn y cefnogi ac yn ymgyrch. Yn y cwrsbwynt, roeddwn ni wedi'u gyrfa'r collig ac ymgyrchu, Jo Fiannix, Professor of Criminology on the topic of youth crime and justice does age matter in which Joe will challenge us to think about what a just response is to youth crime. So it's particularly apt for her to deliver her inaugural lecture during our 50th anniversary year given that the heart of the OU's mission is its commitment to social justice. And now it's time to introduce Joe herself. Joe joined the Open University as Professor of Criminology in 2016. Oops, I think that might be me. I'll move my notes. Her main research interest is the link between social and criminal justice for young people and women. Joe writes about policy and practice reform to youth justice, child sexual exploitation and prostitution. More recently she's become interested in working in issues of on issues of justice in relation to sexualities. She's the author and editor of several books on sex and prostitution and her youth justice research has been published in multiple articles and book chapters. Over the years Joe has taught a very wide range of subjects ranging from the history of crime and punishment right through to youth justice and feminist criminology. She currently chairs our popular level two module understanding criminological theory and says that she particularly enjoys the challenges of teaching complex conceptual and theoretical issues to students. But Joe actually began her association with the Open University as one of our tutors or associate lecturers as we call them way back in 1995. She also taught or maybe the word is experienced OU summer schools. In fact Joe is a living embodiment of both the spirit and the mission of the OU. She left school in Texas at 16 with no qualifications whatsoever and returned to the UK with just her passport and a small suitcase and made her way through part-time study and further education into university courtesy of what was then famously called if you're old enough to remember supplementary benefit. In her spare time Joe's ridden motorbikes done powerlifting and says she's danced all night to underground electronic dance music but Joe describes the OU as her love match university and consequently turned down the chance of doing an inaugural at both Durham and Leicester until she made it back here to the OU her spiritual home in a full-time capacity in 2016. Over the course of her outstanding 20 years as an academic she's been awarded two prizes the John Willis award at Bath University in recognition for outstanding accomplishment in research combined with her contributions to teaching and students pastoral care and in 2010 her edited book Sex for Sale was a finalist in the erotic awards now called the sexual freedom awards for publication of the year. I did think about illustrating those two awards with another slide but modesty forbade me from doing so when I discovered what the prize for the erotic award actually was and I'll leave you to google that later. So on that rather inappropriate note it now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Joe Phoenix. Well well um can everyone hear me okay everyone at the back brilliant okay oh there we go I'm going to go ahead and start fairly promptly without actually telling you all that I feel like crying after that introduction thank you. Before I want to start I want to thank the open university for giving me this opportunity as Ian said I turned down previous opportunities and I can't think of a better place to be giving an inaugural lecture than a place that I feel so at home with. But before I start I also want to make a special note of someone who can't be here today Professor Pat Carlin she's been my PhD supervisor academic manager mentor and always a close and loyal friend her influence is written all over this presentation for those of you who know her work. This lecture is unashamedly about ideas rather than facts and figures it is about the ideas that frame how we respond to youth crime rather than about how to reduce it. The first part of the lecture gives an historical overview of youth justice the second part analyzes the circularity of the debates about youth justice reform in relation to ideas about welfare age justice and risk. The final part presents what I call a community oriented justice which I see as a way out of the circularity of the debates that we've got into. Please keep these three questions in mind as we go through for what I'm going to argue is that we ought to get rid of the youth justice system altogether controversial perhaps but follow me as we go through that age ought to be considered alongside not above other issues like class sex and race but not by formal criminal courts by community courts made up of lay members operating within the law of the land with the power to hold local authorities local services and central government to account for the part it plays in generating the law breaking of youths and adults as well as the other criminogenic features of the local community such as for instance the over policing of particular constituencies of people like young black men or indeed the under protecting of other constituencies like sexually exploited girls and women but before we can do all of this I want to just problematize or make a little bit more complicated two ideas than they would ordinarily seem the idea of crime and the idea of justice so hands up everyone who thinks they are a criminal okay that's a that's a fair few all right okay hands up or in fact stand up if you have persistently broken the law okay we got a few we got a few fantastic all right sit down everyone now for those of you who have not stood up or raised your hands I want to ask you a few questions have you ever charged your phone whilst at work hands up it's a crime called abstracting electricity have you taken stationary pens pencils paper or in fact printer ink cartridges from your place of work theft have you broken the speed limit hands up that's a crime have you made an insurance claim on the basis of accidental damage to one of your belongings when in fact you damaged that thing on purpose oh we've got a few hands we have one hand all right have you taken illegal drugs don't don't put your hands up this is an entertaining way to make three very important points that form part of the domain assumptions for most academic criminologists the first point crime is ubiquitous it's everywhere we all do it criminals aren't out there they aren't special people who have special reasons for committing crime most crime is rational and contextual the second point crime is also politically and socially constructed who and what gets seen as the sort of social problem to which law policing and punishment become the appasite solution is always a matter of politics and social norms third justice likewise is the end product of a series of decisions negotiations social political and economic processes take for instance child sexual exploitation in the space of my own career the problem of young girls being involved in the commercial exchange of sex for money has gone from being seen as a problem of prostitution with the solution being to arrest the girls to being seen as a special type of prostitution related problem with the girls being seen as victims of exploitation and they being used as witnesses in the prosecution of others to being seen as a type of sexual predation all of its own with the solution being to police toxic masculinity I knew I was going to fumble on that word toxic masculinity in the form of gangs to being seen now as just one of the many different types of child sexual abuse with the solution being offered on offer as guidance and advice to all girls and boys about sexual wellbeing that's in the space of my career as you can see the object of policing has changed what comes before the courts has changed who gets punished has changed however many of the empirical realities facing working class girls particularly those growing up in care have not so in short justice is the end product of social and political decisions particularly how we categorize particular types of problems everyone with me so far brilliant okay so the first part we're going to do a little bit of history some of this may be familiar to some of you in the room all right let's remind ourselves where ideas about youth crime and youth justice I'm emphasizing youth on purpose here come from in Britain they were formed in the context of industrialization and urbanization and the massive social changes and social problems that these brought specifically our ideas were formed following the child labor acts for those who don't know those were the acts that kicked the children out of the factories and mines and the subsequent unintended consequence of those acts which was the massive youth vagrancy and poverty that they created bearing in mind those acts took place before the education acts so the kids were kicked out of work had nowhere to go but the streets so as Charles Dickens unforgettably portrayed in the different prospects of Oliver twist and the artful Dodger and as these pictures show this created two very different sorts of childhood experience at the same time we also saw the formation of modern police constabularies and policing along with new practices of recording crime in the form of criminal statistics as the police started policing working class street kids funnily enough the recorded crime statistics demonstrated a rising problem with child crime youth crime so it's against this backdrop and the way that childhood was so fundamentally different along class lines that attempts to deal with the newly discovered problem of child crime i'm not going to do rabbit ears for the entire lecture i promise was created now arguably then youth justice has since its inception been an attempt to deal with oh the rabbit ears came back to deal with problematic working class young people who exist out with the disciplines and norms of family education and work but there is a problem with what i've just said you may have spotted it what i've just said implies that age doesn't matter that youth crime injustice is just an artifice of history a social construct that operates to police the working classes yet age obviously does matter our legal system is based on the aristotlian principle of treating like things alike so when assessing individual degrees of blame worthiness culpability and responsibility for criminal acts we have to conclude that adults and children are not alike this is simple this is simply a byproduct of the fact that human beings have a long development period thus in the ideal world children and young people ought not to be held fully responsible for violation of criminal laws until they are deemed to be fully developed and again in the ideal world the state must act in a benevolent fashion so as to ensure the best interests of the child who offends norms and laws but in the real world we see huge variations in the age of criminal responsibility if we look across these as you can see here it really becomes very difficult to disagree with those who argue that at 10 years old england presently punishes young people at too young an age and in the real world what does it actually mean to say that the state will act in a benevolent fashion and in the best interests of the child well history gives us a sense it also gives us an insight into where and why debates about youth justice reform tend to revolve around a series of unresolvably contradictory ideas so although what i present here looks like a progression over time it's important to stress that these ideas never really go away they simply circulate in the soup of ideas about what we will do and find favor at particular moments are harnessed by practitioners politicians and academics at different moments in history to different effect so in response to the sort of problems that first gave rise to the idea that youth crime and youth justice were somehow separate from adult crime and justice the main theory that was that impoverished social and economic circumstances in which young working class children were being raised corrupted their childhood innocence did not provide the sufficient moral ethical or social foundation to assure their adherence to the disciplines of family employment and reputability so destitution and poverty of the victorian time period in the early 20th centuries were seen as creating ethically deprived depraved socially deprived and morally corrupt young lawbreakers in the middle 20th century though more emphasis was put on how constrained social and economic circumstances created poor parenting and pathological working class families which in turn produced troubled troublesome and needy adolescents each of these ideas found expression in a variety of welfare oriented justice interventions that were instituted from the reformatory schools designed to reform the deprived and depraved to the approved schools presided over by a cater of professionals who all existed in order that the various psychological and social needs of the disturbed needy young people could be addressed but all that began to change in the 1970s when the crime when the question of crime and justice especially youth crime was politicized in a way that had not been witnessed before many of us will remember this part of the history in 1979 that your position the rule of laws inseparable from the conservative radical right position that blamed what they saw as the decay and disintegration of a moral and ordered society on labour writing on a wave of popular authoritarianism with a strong emphasis on a punitive response to crime young lawbreakers were seen less as needy and more as criminal once elected the state response to youth crime split in two on the grounds of saving money young people whose misdeeds were low level were simply diverted out of the juvenile justice system as it was and on the grounds of a punitive response a rising number of young people also found themselves incarcerated but 1993 was an absolute watershed year the shocking case of the murder of james bulger by thompson and venables called into collect called into question are collective understandings of the innocence of childhood and attitudes began to harden that same year the then prime minister john major declaimed of youth crime that quote society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less this was met by labour's own tough on crime tough on the causes of crime as the decade unfolded the media focused on stories about feral out of control persistent young lawbreakers who were given monarchers like rat boy boomerang boy spider boy blip boy all of these ideas fed three very simple ideas one that there was no point trying to stop youth crime that what we needed was a new way simply to manage the problem two that the cost of the system was spiralling out of control and three that the real cause of youth crime was the faulty risk reasoning of some young people and the solution seems simple enough a more justice oriented actuarial youth justice system this came in the form of the crime and disorder act in 1998 this act made it routine to criminalize children 10 years old and upward by getting rid of something called dolly inka packs which in effect had previously set the age of criminal responsibility at 14 it also introduced as bows established the youth justice board youth offending teams and a host of other important changes now importantly it also made the primary aim of the new youth justice system to prevent children and young people offending by ensuring that the risk factors which were seen as driving their law breaking were reduced including their own faulty risk reasoning as the years went on the crime and disorder act led to what barry goldson called an industrial scale expansion of youth justice whereby younger and younger young people were pulled into the system and more and more were incarcerated at one time we had the dubious pleasure of being the country in europe that incarcerated the most number of children and young people this expansion coupled with the profound social and economic changes have led arguably to a new set of ideas about the cause of crime over the course of the 21st century we have seen rises in youth unemployment and the destruction of what little was left of welfare entitlements to the young and we've also seen the normalization of the highly precarious economic and social situation that marks the lives of so many young working class and black and ethnic minority young people today in other words we've seen poor quality schooling and education few jobs few grants few meaningful programs little or no prospects for independent living and a limited sense of the future as well as political marginalisation quite a depressing picture really arguably these are the very conditions that provide the context for youth for law breaking and let's just remember that as reported last year by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty the immiseration of young people in england and wales is not by chance it was produced it is by design by a quote punitive and often callous government and the end result of a social engineering program referred to as austerity politics so over the same period though the way that young people in conflict with the law have been treated has raised concerns nationally and internationally not only has the united the UNCRC reports continued to raise questions about the welfare rights of young offenders and condemn england's reliance on incarcerating young people our own HM inspectorate of prisons reported in february 2017 that there was not a single youth offending institute or secure training centre in england and wales which was deemed safe to hold children at the same time develop its developments and neuroscience dovetailed with these concerns to raise profound questions about both the risk factor prevention paradigm which i'll talk to you about in a second and current practices and youth justice the logic goes like this you may not know this neuroscience so follow me for a second i'll make it really easy for you there is a part of your brain called the amygdala now the amygdala supposedly controls impulsivity in human beings yet there is mounting evidence that the amygdala is not fully developed until around the age of 26 years old 26 not 10 26 so that fault so that one could argue faulty risk reasoning may well be biological in origin and if so then seeing children as criminal and holding them to criminal account for their deviance seems far from just what's being suggested in these new critiques of what's happening is that youthful law breaking is in fact a crisis in youth transition that youth itself is a transition from biological physical social immaturity of childhood to the competence and capacity of adulthood the subtext this time unlike the earlier subtext of deprived and depraved of victorian times is this that there is a normal transition that the economy or society will provide enough of the right type of jobs to enable all young people to transition even though blatantly this is not the case in the real world and that law breaking and deviance signify a significant threat everyone with me that was a lot of history so in the next section i want to show how contemporary debates about reforming youth justice end up in a set of circular unresolvable critiques and debates between opposing approaches to stopping the deviant young person becoming a deviant adult first approach this is all a bit abstract guys so i'll pause every now and then meaningfully okay the first approach uh we're going to call this the welfare well-being oriented approach this approach has a main assumption that delinquents and law breaking are products of adverse social economic familial psychological and environmental factors this approach favors treatment to be determined by an individual's neediness if you like and sentences ought to be individualized and flexible and shaped by the best interests of the child not necessarily in accordance with standardized rules in practice this approach led to indeterminate sentencing in the past social work interventions which were often about incarceration that left young people and parents without legal recourse or challenge like the right to appeal now you may want to just remember the image from the timeline you remember the clockwork orange image that was up there right that was of something called the ludovico technique from clockwork orange the novel was antonie burgess's early justice oriented critique of a welfare model of intervention the question burgess raised was whether in the name of justice the state has the right to suspend a person's or family's rights to do process and intervene into the very psyches of individuals now against this we see the justice or rights oriented approach the main assumption here is that law breaking is a result of choice and opportunity and the main principles framing the response are proportionality accountability determinancy of sentencing equity and protection through due of rights through due process now this the debate between these two sides has been the most long running and circular debates within youth justice the justice approach has raised questions about the justness of indeterminate sentences and the social work interventions that I mentioned earlier yet on the other hand proponents of several different welfare models hold the view that adult society has a moral obligation to ensure that the primary concern of youth justice should be to promote young people's welfare needs and in so doing critique the justice based model on the grounds that such models are philosophically problematic they introduce the idea that retributive justice a just measure of pain is appropriate with young people and that this approach tends to abrogate the state's responsibility and leave the welfare needs of the child unaddressed so two completely polar views that cannot be reconciled third approach actuarial justice now a word for those of you who may never have heard the term actuarial or think you've heard it but not sure where you've heard it from it actually comes from the idea of actuarial science which is the discipline that applies mathematical and statistical models to assess risk in insurance for instance and finance the main assumption behind this approach is that law breaking is rational driven by the accumulation of risk factors and caused by faulty assessment of risks and benefits on the part of the individual and the main principles framing the response is the reduction of risk factors the management of crime and preventative sentencing now to quote one of the originators of this thing called the risk factor prevention paradigm which sits underneath this a man called david farrington the task is quote to identify the key risk factors for offending and implement prevention methods designed to counteract them end quote such an approach can quote be used not only to identify variables to be targeted but also to identify persons to be targeted in an intervention program end quote typically these are things such as quote low intelligence low empathy impulsiveness family problems abuse and neglect target and these are targeted for intensive work with problem children and their families in practice typically the targets are poor black and minority ethnic young men children from working class families single parent families children with educational issues in other words the same old same old now it's worth noting that preventative sentencing and justice are also philosophically problematic particularly for children because it's based on an assessment of future behavior rather than punishment or treatment for past behavior everyone's still with me if i put anyone to sleep yet no doesn't look like it okay the fourth approach is not so much an approach as an attempt to reinvigorate aspects of both the welfare and the justice approach in a very 21st century way calling this a child friendly approach the fact that that little pie piece is sitting outside the circle is on purpose it wasn't an accident it's because this approach hasn't actually been fully implemented per se it's more of a critique of where we're at but the main assumption is that law breaking is developmental and or a sign of a troubled transition it's sitting outside the pie chart as i said because it hasn't really been put fully into practice the principles do however underlie some of the Welsh child first offenders second approach there's also something called the positive futures approach but in this model what we see is children and young people as rights bearers right the bearers of rights due to their legally protected status underneath the u n c r c that's the convention on the rights of a child and young law breakers here are seen as needing legal protections from the state which is a very different position now proponents of various welfare well-being models suggest that contemporary practices of youth justice actively damage children and young people and damage their well-being and thus their transition to adulthood all right this is a way of summarizing it up and what i've tried to indicate is that the concentration on how to stop our concentration on how to stop young law breakers becoming adult law breakers has ended up in these the circularity of debate between unresolvably contradictory positions and this is just an attempt to graphically demonstrate that but we can verbally demonstrate it by saying welfare models question actuarial models for jeopardizing a young person's transition to adulthood they also question the use of retributive or punitive preventative punishments which ignore the development needs of a young person and thereby adult orate youth justice and contemporary versions of youth justice of justice models see actuarial and some forms of welfare as actively damaging and causing harm to the young person and so on and so on and so on it just keeps going round and round and round right i want to have another look at this but this time instead of rehearsing the more or less standard debates right i've just summarized them i want to just draw your attention to a very specific thing within these debates interestingly all youth justice models do actually recognize a young person's social and economic context all of them do and how this might relate to their own to their law breaking but in their own ways each one focuses almost entirely on how to change the young person this is a problem because the emphasis on the individual serves to exclude or deprioritize the well-known links between criminal and social justice between structural social inequalities and social discrimination and the administration of criminal justice and indeed criminalization a word we'll come back to now rather than go through each one of these in turn i want to think about the actuarial model in just a tiny bit of detail for it tells us something quite interesting welfare and child friendly and justice rights models critique the actuarial model for ignoring the social context and for focusing almost entirely on it getting the young person to change their less than law abiding behavior through a series of programs of interventions like anger management victim awareness programs and so on yet the risk factor prevention paradigm is framed loosely within an epidemiological approach one could argue that had it been properly implemented it might have provided a potent way of addressing the links between social inequalities and criminal justice i'm going to borrow a line of argument from two very promising scholars in the US tim goddard and randy Myers let's think a little bit about zika the zika virus here for a second in the public health epidemiological approach individuals were asked to apply mosquito repellent this is like the anger management programs that young offenders are given young lawbreakers are given but a truly public health or epidemiological approach to zika also sprayed the wetlands that generated the mosquitoes that would bite now this would be the equivalent of us addressing the social inequalities that are experienced by young people but instead these opportunities were lost in the drive to hold the individual young person accountable and responsible so before moving on to the final part of the presentation let's remind ourselves why it's important to think about those failed opportunities to address social inequality hands up those of you who committed a crime when you were a youth right everyone just look around the room for a second we got pretty much 90% I'd say oh I need to put my hand up hands up those of you who got arrested we have less than a handful less than a handful okay now that quick exercise as fun as it is also points to a very important concept within criminology that's the concept of criminalisation i.e. coming to the attention of the criminal justice system most of us commit crime many of us committed crime as youngsters few of us come to the attention of the criminal justice system now what we know from nearly two centuries of research into youth crime as mentioned at the outside of the lecture is a very high correlation between social inequalities disadvantage discrimination and criminalisation very high correlation but sadly we can't prove it through statistics because the government doesn't routinely record the class position of those that come before the youth courts instead we have to see that correlation through the use of a series of proxy measures so the sort of patterns that we see young people in the youth justice system young people in the youth justice system tend to come from areas of above average levels of unemployment and where there is poor access to public services there are a disproportionate number of looked after children in the youth justice system approximately five times too many in 2014 to 2016 61% of those in those in the youth justice system were not engaging in education 45% had substance misuse issues 30% had mental health issues and we need to also remember that there are high correlations between economic adversity family struggles poor housing and higher levels of ill health and finally in the UK longitudinal studies have confirmed what us criminologists have been saying for a very long time the single most significant predictor of future offending is contact with the youth justice system plain and simple now just to underscore that a few stats I tried to stay away from numbers I'm quite proud of the fact that most of the articles and books I've written don't have numbers in them but I'm giving you a few here in 2007 around 115 000 young people came into the youth justice system for the first time just 115 000 right by 2017 it was only 14 000 right that's a decline of over 86 a massive decline in the numbers of young people coming into the youth justice system yet as this shows the proportion of black and ethnic minority young people in the youth justice system is going up so we can begin to see some of these inequalities and discriminations just through these now this racialization is evident elsewhere other anglophone countries display same or similar trends in 2017 and 18 every single young person who was incarcerated in the northern territories of Australia was Aboriginal every single young person and those stats show the same in America they show a very clear and much higher correlations between class race and criminalization okay still with me have I depressed you good right let's see how we can get out of this right because I don't I don't I don't know about you I don't like being depressed I'm actually quite a cherry person believe it or not so how do we escape this endless circularity of age-related justice issues how can we link social and criminal justice in what we do now I hope what's come out for you so far is that when we give precedence to considerations of age difference in debate about what to do with young people who are in trouble with the law we end up in that circularity it's it's a necessary thing because the problematic becomes how do we stop young people who are breaking the law from becoming adults breaking the law and yet even within some of the models that we've outlined earlier it is possible to imagine a response that emphasizes the role of social disadvantage as well as how a variety of social discriminations around class race gender sex religion and so on shape the administration of justice now one way to do this I want to suggest to you something that I'm calling community oriented justice community oriented justice sees young people and adults who are suspected or found guilty as part of the community in which they live rather than merely or only a set of walking risk factors transitioning to a law abiding adulthood but before I tell you what community oriented justice is I want to tell you what it is not it is not controlling crime via community policing it is not controlling crime by community courts although I'm going to call them community courts in a second so it's a little bit confusing there it's not restorative justice and it's not reparative justice panels all of these forms of justice require the individual to repair the damage that they have committed to the community so again it places the onus back on the individual nor are they problem solving specialist diversionary courts which are an alternative to formal adjudication even though these have been established to deal with complex and profound welfare related problems now a community oriented justice has the this main assumption that adults and young people who come to the attention of criminal justice share more in common than separates them and the emphasis of my suggestion for a community oriented justice needs to be on ameliorating the effects of social injustice what would this look like these are a new form of community courts these community courts are lay people comprised of lay people operating within the laws of the land they are empowered to develop greater understanding and evidence of the criminogenic features of their communities for those who don't know that term it means the things that produce crime such as the over policing of black and ethnic minority young people the lack of public leisure facilities for young people they would need to analyze data and trends including the identification of areas producing disproportionate numbers of young lawbreakers and the socio economic drivers of any of these of growth in any of these they would use this understanding to hold local authorities police constabularies and through them central government accountable for their abrogation in their duties to tackle the sources of youthful and adult crime in the area and they could take part in political discussions at the local authority level about how to resolve some of the problems that young people face such as youth unemployment the lack of access to housing the lack of further education of occasional training without burdening young people with debt now age here is treated as just one of the many salient factors that courts take account of along with class race sex and gender when addressing the criminogenic features of the community so the focus is the community it's not the individual now the possibilities are almost limitless community courts could order local police constabularies to address the manner in which they over police arrest and charge particular constituencies of individuals or particular types of people they could order local authorities to address the sources of fear and insecurity that drive other groups of young people to carry knives for instance or through concerted action to address the economic drivers that make knife and drug crime a rational and reasonable response to often extreme economic precarity or local authorities could create more usable safe friendly and free public spaces and leisure facilities for young people in other words these things could offer entirely novel experimentation with a totally different way of understanding and addressing the issues inherent in the complexity of young people's transition to adulthood as well as in adult lives as i said at the beginning of the lecture it was all about ideas it's not about what can be done to reduce law breaking of young people or how to reform youth justice the purpose was simply to open a space to conceive of a form of justice that does not take age differentiation and the idea of young people's transitions to adulthood as the overriding concerns determining our official response the lecture was also utterly utopian in its vision for an alternative form of justice and make no apologies for this as i believe it is not possible to address issues of social justice without recourse to blue skies thinking and visions and let's face it if we were all tied to imagining only what was realistic and grounded in the realities of the present i dare say that such a thing as an open university would not exist now before i hand over the podium before i finish i just want to thank a few people sadly no one from why does it always happen at this point right sadly no one from my family of origin could make it here tonight although i'm sorry about that i am however delighted that my family of choice could make it here tonight this is the rabble in the front row for those of you who don't know over the years all of you in your various ways have helped me through the hard times and celebrated my achievements with bottles of champagne lots of bottles of champagne late night talks around various campfires or sitting sipping some cocktail or other at one or other festivals and camps that have punctuated our summers together i want to mention one person in particular ruby in the front row she's still young and yet to transition although her future is very promising she's been nominated as one of the brightest young people in wales ruby if my story has anything to say it's that your future is limited only by your imagination imagine big and push hard because everything is possible finally i want to thank my partner pj bucannon she has had a tremendous influence on my life and yet how she shaped my work seldom gets acknowledged she has spent our lifetime encouraging me to chase my dreams and flights of fancy whether that was a readership at Durham wearing pink fairy wings at a festival that won't happen again or indeed chasing my dreams to come work here at the open university what few people know is she wakes up every morning to my latest thesis and she listens patiently pj i adore you and i thank you from the bottom of my heart hey i think it's that time of the evening when we move to the q&a q&a session yeah we're good at doing the um little and large dublack so obviously if you've got thoughts questions or just comments and observations um let's let's hear them jojo join us over at the okay so shall we start off in the room who have we got in the room right in the far back corner do you just want to wait for a mic just to come up i think i'm i think i'm going to start by giving some observations right one of the via current themes i know just throughout this lecture is opportunities a major factor for basically think basic criminalisation and whatnot and i think it's one point where i was saying is for me personally the open university has played a major part in giving me giving me prospects i might not otherwise have so i think actually in giving people hope the open university is a key example of how you can give people that oh that's a nice observation thank you very much hello francis chatwind um i am actually a adult and family magistrate but not a youth magistrate uh in cornwall and see social injustice in the courtroom every time we go in there um you know from the um businessman with his qc trying to avoid a driving ban compared to the pregnant single mother with two children also trying to avoid a driving ban and defending herself so i absolutely agree with you um i wasn't quite so sure about all of your utopian ideas um a lay court um you know being a lay magistrate you need the professionals in the courtroom to make sure you actually stick to the law and and produce legal responses but i wondered if you could say which one thing you would do moving towards your utopia to help the youth justice system move in the right direction that's a really good question because there's always got to be steps hasn't there to utopia and the first step might be a little bit more realistic than the end product that i was trying to envisage and i think one of the things if we could create a mechanism or a means or even authorize give power to perhaps a magistrates court probably have to be outside to actually do the equivalent of do you remember the crime audits of the 1990s so for those of you who don't know crime audits of the 1990s they came off the back of the crime and disorder act uh local police constabularies were meant to understand the issues of crime and disorder in their local community um and they're from that there would be a community safety uh plan um now you could use exactly those same techniques of kind of auditing a local community for what the problems are where the problems are but instead of focusing on like individual senses of security you actually use as i indicated uh at the very end you use some of the data that you can generate about where policing is most concentrated where people are experiencing most of those difficulties and actually use that to begin to generate a conversation at the local political level about how to engage and how to change some of those problems because one of the problems that you've got as a magistrate i mean you'll know this much more than i do but one of the challenges that i see from magistrates is you see those social inequalities and yet what can you do about them and where do where does all the knowledge that you have go i mean literally it goes nowhere except home with you doesn't it yeah so somehow we've got to take the knowledge that's happening and indeed you know i can't imagine that anybody gets involved in criminal justice work for wrong reasons so we have to somehow harness that energy to create a very different sort of discussion about who and what needs to be held accountable does that i mean it's utopian but sounds good so let's take one more in the room and then we'll we'll move to an online one thank you very much joe uh sorry steve tombs i'm a colleague of of joe's here at the open university um that was lovely joe although i want to say that i don't think at the end you're utopian enough actually and i'll make two observations uh one is that stewart hall and his colleague stewart hall formerly of this parish um in police and the crisis in 1978 says something like that power phrase we only understand who a society criminalizes when we understand who it doesn't criminalize so as well as your quasi abolitionistic tendencies towards the end i'd also argue that that they're further by maintaining as part of our vision abolishing the corporation and abolishing the state i think they go hand in hand with some of your utopian visions at the very end and the second thing to say which is kind of related is that where on a local level those kind of what you just alluded to which i would think of as harm audits where local communities are asked to audit harms which blight their lives on a daily basis and thwart their life opportunities they almost never refer to the kinds of things which are criminalized in the society they almost never refer to the intervilities which we've criminalized under the term anti social anti social behaviour orders they of course refer to the state of the natural environment the lack of access to to to hospitals to healthcare to to job opportunities and all of those kinds of things so i'll just say in those two respects i mean i think they're linked and i think that your your utopianism could be extended even further but thank you very much for that no you're welcome you're welcome when you when you held your hand up i was quaking oh where's that gonna go where's that gonna go i think one of the things just to underline though i mean i i agree you could go as far as as you want with this because as i say the the the opportunities are almost limitless or the ideas are almost limitless however where it starts is whether we have a youth justice system or not so in fact one of the things i was trying to just disturb if you like and just split off is the idea that we have to treat young people separately in this new world so yeah but totally agree okay thanks Steve this is a question that came in by email before the lecture actually and it's dear joe is it right the children are those under 18 years in the crown courts having committed a serious offence should be treated as though they were adult and tried accordingly or should children be protected from the harm this could potentially cause children are constantly developing developing emotionally physically and of course psychologically and therefore punishments should be carefully taught through so as to protect children while at the same time keeping them free from further offending i myself was taken through the criminal courts for a serious offence a mason to a young offenders institution although i never reoffended it has caused significant harm both psychologically and emotionally as i now have mental health problems and struggle in my ability to engage socially would have very well worded and thoughtful question and also one that contains the exact circularity that i was outlining it contains it all within one person's experience i don't know how to answer it beyond saying yes it is wrong okay let's go back to the room i think i thought a couple of hands over here colleague thank you um jason wall um i'd just like to ask a question about your utopian future if we're in this utopian future it seems over the last two decades at least we have ministers coming into various positions within the justice system who come in with particular ideas they you know come in like a wrecking ball and impose their particular ideas about what they want justice to be and then especially in the last five years six months later they've gone um in your utopian future would ministers have much role in the governance or in the um um uh the kind of authoritative structure of these lay positions or would it be completely removed um neither removed neither removed nor have authority so this is the one bit steven i are going to have to have a discussion about this much later but this is the one bit that i would say i perhaps wasn't as utopian enough because i would keep the government there but i'd have the um systems of accountability inverted right so it would be the lay courts through the the lay courts would hold local authorities to account through them central government to account so the discussions would be coming up from the ground um so we would have governments and ministers who were truly servants of the public rather than masters determining other people's fates and futures i mean it is almost impossible but hey you know we can dream the impossible really good answer we got time for maybe two more so i think it was somebody at the back right and then have we got another online one or one at the front maybe another online one as well okay so three more questions hi there my name's Vanessa um i actually work for a charity so um i see a lot of this with young people on our project um one of them set a small fire in a back garden a long time ago and worries this will prevent her from getting a job in the future a lot of the work we do around supporting young people and changing their life trajectory is around mentoring so i wondered what your thoughts are obviously utopias uh you know maybe but what about now what we're doing now and your thoughts on mentoring i mean i was having i was having a conversation at lunchtime um i think it was lunchtime today i think we were having a conversation about this that one of the challenges that you've got particularly with kids who are growing up in in in care or who are coming from really challenging family circumstances is that they almost never get the chance to make mistakes without severe consequence um and the answer comes in two parts so forgive me the first part is they don't get a chance to make mistakes without consequence i sat in a youth court once for six months watching the business there was a 13 year old and a 14 year old boy who ended up in a secure training centre because they had drunk a skinful of cider and started kicking the fence of the local authority children's home that they lived in and the people in the children's home rang the police and they got arrested for criminal damage now of course if that was you or me and it was our kid who did that you know they may get a clip around the air they may get you know sentence not sentence you know kind of told to go stay in their bedroom they may be involved in having to mend the fence there would be some sort of consequence that was slightly more commensurate but it would also be generally from an adult or indeed siblings who could help that person understand what was happening and why that was wrong and i think mentoring has a fantastic role in helping young people understand what can be possible and providing if you like role models and and those kind of responsible relationships but again the problem becomes focusing on getting the individual to change and even today on radio four i don't know how many of you listened to radio four in the morning there was a short clip about doctors over prescribing antidepressants for poverty basically so you know we we come to this this kind of backwards and forwards mentoring is great but it's only one tiny part of a much bigger problem as no doubt you well know from your own experiences okay thanks joe i think we've got time for just two more so maybe one online and then one in one in the room thank you joe um lots of really warm feedback coming in from facebook because i just want to let you know that was that was brilliant thank you um so just one question from michelle who's asking is it the parents or the young adults who are at fault or is it the society that we live in um is there anyone in the room who might be able to answer that on my behalf um it's a combination of everything isn't it really however i would say that most of us commit crime most of us commit crime in fact i think every nearly everybody raised their hands so if we talk about just the parents being wrong then we've all come from really bad families um so it is in large part the social context in which we live crime lawbreaking is rational i think my questions have probably been answered already but it's just about uh looked after children because they're um everything about looked after children is below the bar no matter what way you measure it and regardless of how many children are looked after who achieve and achieve great success so many more or do not succeed so near utopia would you have a special place for looked after children have you and i you know because their need is so huge even with bme or whatever way you whatever you want to measure things with looked after children their measures are just worse is there anything you do differently with them uh orla that that's a question that has literally um been in my mind since i first started doing research with child sexual exploitation because of course what you have with looked after children is where the main institution in our society fails the family fails and how do we replicate something like a family okay we can have state care there's no two ways about it but uh that state care has to be held to account to a level that sadly it is not currently funded um and governments aren't held to account to make sure that they provide what is necessary for the professionals to do the job that they need to do for the kids so in my utopia again if we see you know six times as many kids in care ending up in the youth justice system in you know one particular area of bristol for instance then those lay community courts need to be involved in a very big discussion with the local authority and through them central government about funding so it's it's a kind of long term build up you know and i can't you know this utopian vision cannot be confined just to law breaking it's got to go way wider than that come the revolution okay thank you jo okay well thank you jo for really excellent lecture and um a great uh session afterwards i think the fact there was a lot of warm faith facebook feedback said it all really a really really good session so let's give jo another round of applause